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Making Emacs Popular Again

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#531

New employee 1 workflow at company X: 1. Install VS Code 2. Click extensions and install language specific plugin 3. Work New employee 2 workflow at company X: 1. Install emacs 2. Try to install some source code indexing tool 3. Tool is missing 13 dependencies, so spend 4 hours finding, installing and configuring the dependencies. 4. Spend another couple hours reading non-existent to terrible documentation (documenta…

In what sad, warped alternative reality did this happen?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#532

New employee 1 workflow at company X: 1. Install VS Code 2. Click extensions and install language specific plugin 3. Work New employee 2 workflow at company X: 1. Install emacs 2. Try to install some source code indexing tool 3. Tool is missing 13 dependencies, so spend 4 hours finding, installing and configuring the dependencies. 4. Spend another couple hours reading non-existent to terrible documentation (documenta…

I am not a passionate Emacs user and I strongly dislike the weird bugs that rear their heads sometimes. I was always a vim user, but switched to Emacs because it has better support for completion, etc. while having nearly perfect vi emulation. I would even go as far as saying that Evil is vi implemented in Emacs Lisp. I try VS Code every now and then, but I always stop because of two reasons: incomplete vi(m) emulati…

How does emacs have better support for completion than vim?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#533
post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that everyone has to have a non-empty, non trivial .emacs file means it is maximally unsuitable - for everyone. The fact that I have a non trivial .emacs file ensures that when I switch machines, I only have to transfer a single file to enable an identical development environment. I can't speak for VS Code, as I've only ever played with it a couple of times, but can I do the same thing there? I don't want…

I'm not familiar with emacs. Does that mean that you don't need to install any supporting software like indexers, linters, syntax highlighters, etc? Does the emacs file contain all that or tell it how to download all the plugins? If you could just copy one file and get all that, that's pretty cool.

You install something like spacemacs or doom emacs for vs code parity. And then it lazy loads packages based on the file type.

You enable features in config by uncommenting, and it auto installs.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#534
How do you make scrolling to work not line-by-line but pixel-by-pixel in... MacOS and Ubuntu? There’s some arcane installs that are each incrementally better than the next one but none match the native scrolling experience you’d usually see in a modern/graphical text editor

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#535
I think licensing is not the problem, why nobody installs emacs anymore. It is initial setup. Where can I get a good code highlighter for all my code. Integration into obscure ide's compilers like iar. A workflow showing me easily what I changed, which files to check into git. A nice git overview of file history thanks to extensions. where can I get all this easily. One click and have a dark theme. Also easily customizable shortcuts. Manpower behind the editor for many changes and improvements. I mean who pumps out new versions every month.

I would say vs code does all that and while using an easy to overcome entry bar. And I am much more productive even than in native ide's for embedded development. Like iar eclipse or Segger.

The only thing I would want to try is using the org mode in emacs for nice todo handling. But else I see no appeal in emacs. It is just ugly, more concerned about it's license instead of just saying, this is free software just contribute and we will improve by using everything we can.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#536
First of all I really like the value of Emacs as a modern lisp machine. And it is the best environment to write in any lisp language.

But for anything else it is not good enough. Emacs Lisp is better then vimscript but only if you are extending it. For just configuration I prefer vimscript because it is so terse.

But IMO just better then vimscript is setting the bar too low. Imagine if it had something like Neovim's msgpack and you could extend it in any language you like. I am still hopeful something like that will happen.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would expect an experienced emacs user to have a config already that more or less "works". Was this a junior developer that just decided to start using emacs one day? I'm not an emacs person myself, but every emacs person I have ever met already has it setup and customized and just brings their config. A new dev starting with emacs on a new job... just sounds like a bad recipe and misunderstood priorities.

While I think you're right on the whole here about "Emacs people," but you did an interesting thing in the first sentence: you contrasted experienced Emacs user with junior developer. And I think that actually points to a problem: people who are experienced developers but not experienced Emacs users are going to be in much the same position as the OP's description. While I know the basics of Emacs, every time I try t…

> I'm probably gonna keep doing my technical writing in BBEdit until I die, but that's a different post.

Please produce that post. Also, why not developing in BBEdit?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#538
post #404

> "Perhaps we should implement a mode that puts cosmetics on Emacs so it will appeal to those who judge by the surface of things." I'm sorry to react to first quote, but as I kept reading I kept coming back to it. My thoughts on that : how you present yourself is how you want (and are going) to be judged. In general I think Emacs has been user-hostile, as said here, just by its terminology. Nobody outside a minority…

> I think Emacs has been user-hostile I don't agree. It requires a bit of learning if you are used to something else. >I have suffered therefore the others have to suffer This isn't true. Try, instead "I put some effort into learning it, and you can too." Deeper understanding leads to higher productivity.

Ah yeah, the minutes of saved effort after pouring hours of effort into trying to understand esoteric arcane emacs-only concepts and writing some Elisp.

seriously though, it's a rabbit hole. Been there myself, now I just us vscode and it's a breeze!

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#539
post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This view is obviously biased against Emacs, but I don't disagree completely with the premise. As an Emacs user, being "immediately productive" (whatever that means) is not your topmost priority. You mold your Emacs to a workflow unique to you, notice things you are doing often, add elisp functions to change it to make those things easier, and carry them with you from job to job. As your job evolves and changes, you…

> You mold your Emacs to a workflow unique to you, notice things you are doing often, add elisp functions to change it to make those things easier, and carry them with you from job to job. In most jobs I worked for, taking files home from employer computers would be stealing from security point of view no matter what their contents are. So it means that one has to create those configurations from scratch every single…

It depends on the job. Certainly you can't add any company-specific tools to your overall init file.

However, most of the stuff I do isn't that specific so I have all my customisations in a git repo that I pull from github to whatever machine I'm working on.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#540

New employee 1 workflow at company X: 1. Install VS Code 2. Click extensions and install language specific plugin 3. Work New employee 2 workflow at company X: 1. Install emacs 2. Try to install some source code indexing tool 3. Tool is missing 13 dependencies, so spend 4 hours finding, installing and configuring the dependencies. 4. Spend another couple hours reading non-existent to terrible documentation (documenta…

I worked for a company where the founder thought everybody should use the same tools (meaning the tools he used: OpenSuse, KDE, VSCode, etc...) so that we can help each other and, like you propose, we wouldn't have to fiddle with anything since he would provide configuration for everything.

I've had plenty of problems running this garbage, and everytime he wouldn't help and would just say something along the lines of "what did you do? I've never ever had a problem with it".

If you think VSCode or any other tool doesn't need fiddling then you haven't pushed that tool beyond the basics.

Use what you know and what you're comfortable with. Sometimes VSCode is lacking at things where Emacs shines and vice-versa.

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